8.2.13

A new play published by Columbia University Press

Columbia University Press:The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts, a new play by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with an introduction by Kenneth Reinhard.

The Incident at Antioch is a key play marking Alain Badiou’s transition from classical Marxism to a “politics of subtraction” far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics.

This bilingual edition presents L’Incident d’Antioche in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel’s The City, Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer’s extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou’s intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play’s settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off. [Read More]

Praise for the book

Badiou resembles Sartre in the versatility, creativity, and energy that make them major literary authors as well as philosophers. It is a measure of Spitzer's talent as a translator that she manages to preserve the literariness of Badiou's language—its difficulty, strangeness, and beauty—while making it vivid and fluid and consistent with the syntactical and grammatical demands of English.

— Joseph Litvak, Tufts University

Badiou is one of very few writers for the theater to reflect explicitly on the contemporary possibilities and limits of political theater.

— Peter Hallward, Kingston University

Between three Pauls, the apostle, Claudel, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Badiou revives the tradition of political theater. In language of unprecedented beauty, he portrays a city--both archaic and ultra-contemporary--whose prince is, or will be, a woman.